Simon Wells is an American tourist and falls for a young lady named Joan. Joan has many problems, one of her biggest problems is her brother King that is the leader of a youth gang. King disliked Simon, Joan ended up on Simon's boat and they landed on a military island. Simon ends up on the island searching for Simon and Joan. They end up running into a pack of very polite but strange children. Prying into what is going on, the 3 adults learn the kids are the subject of a government experiment.It's an artsy fartsy film with with an underlying social commentary of what was going on during the time era (namely the youth gangs). I found it an okay film - it's not awful. It was slow and draggy at times other times sorta faster paced. The film took a long while to get to the heart of the matter which are the children in the facility... that messed up the film for me.I agree that Oliver Reed was a very nice looking man and he did played the role of King quite well - he was really the highlight of the entire movie.6/10

Following his divorce, retired American insurance executive MacDonald Carey (as Simon Wells) goes on a holiday boating trip along the rocky coast of Weymouth, England. On the promenade, he sees sexually arousing Shirley Anne Field (as Joan) saunter by with come hither hips. They quickly decide to copulate, but she turns out to be part of a plot to beat-up and rob the middle-aged Mr. Carey. Having second thoughts, Ms. Field decides to leave the black leather motorcycle gang led by darkly handsome brother Oliver Reed (as King) and hops on Carey's boat. They run away from Mr. Reed and hide in a cliff-side bungalow. Passionately possessive of his wayward sister, Reed follows the couple in hot pursuit. The trio finally meet-up in a hidden cave which houses nine 11-year-old children. Their guardian is dictator-like Alexander Knox (as Bernard), who is seeing attractive sculptress Viveca Lindfors (as Freya Neilson)...The young children have a horrifying secret...There appear to be two disconnected story lines, here. The first resembles a 1950s juvenile delinquent film, which might be described as age versus rebellious youth. This is layered with, and eventually replaced by, an apocalyptic science fiction film. Both have subplots. Directed with some flair by Joseph Losey, "The Damned" would have been better if more connections were made. The vague ones are intriguing. The children wonder how nine of them are going to copulate; they are an uneven number. The main adult players also form an uneven number, with incest playing a part. The girl Rachel Clay (as Victoria) assumes a leadership role among the young children. The boy Kit Williams (as Henry) obviously parallels the delinquent Reed. With stronger threading, the whole picture could have been weaved into something much more worthwhile. James Bernard's music, especially the "Black Leather Rock" theme, is very catchy.****** The Damned (5/19/63) Joseph Losey ~ MacDonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed, Alexander Knox

This Amalgamation of a Movie is Memorable for so Many Things. It is Atmospheric and Unsettling, Disjointed and Alarming, Incohesive and Interesting, Profound and Disturbing. In Fact, in America it was Deemed Controversial after the Cuban Missile Crisis and so much so that its Release was not only Delayed but Edited and Dumped Years Later and Plunked to be Forgotten on the Bottom of a Hammer Double Bill.Watching it Today, it is a Cold War Message Piece involving Radioactive Children Reared in Laboratories like so many Rats. They are at once more Endearing and Sympathetic than Anyone on Screen.The Opening Teddy Boy Juvenile Crime Sequence, at First Showing the "Evil" Street Thugs with an Incestuous Leader of the Villains is a Striking Contrast to the Real Evil in the Movie that is Radiation, Scientific Indifference, and Government Secrets.It is a Cold and Unforgettable Film that at First Glance seems Clunky, Confusing, and a Hopeless Mess, is Afterwards Ingrained in the Consciousness and what Remains is a Chilling Experience and its Message, just like the Movie, is One for the Ages.

That the very mention of the word 'Hammer' brings to mind the Gothic settings, garish colours and tightly corseted maidens of British horror films of the 1950s and 1960s might explain why Joseph Losey's The Damned is something of an oddity. That Hammer is often seen as British cinema's only viable claim to an indigenous phenomenon gives a further indication, because The Damned is transnational; directed by an American filmmaker, with an American distributor (Columbia) and, it could be argued, rife with American themes - specifically the connection of rock n' roll culture to violence and the threat of atomic science on mankind. The setting here is not a fog filled stage set masquerading as period London or Eastern Europe but a post-war seaside town (Weymouth) terrorised by a gang of recalcitrant teddy- boys led by Oliver Reed's menacing hoodlum. The scientists are not camp, eccentric, wild- eyed mad men creating monsters and surrogate families in outrageous laboratories using vague and nonsensical science but are government men experimenting on children with atomic power. The solid and steady British directors employed by Hammer make way for an American 'auteur' who, stigmatised by the House Un-American Activities Committee, had been forced to move to Britain and adopt a pseudonym. Instead of Cushing and Lee doing battle as literary man-and-monster we have a dandy and violent youth in a tweed jacket fighting patriarchal threats and his own repression, while the victims here are not the aforementioned tightly corseted maidens at the mercy of a lustful monster but a group of precocious, emotionally starved children living in a bunker. Finally, the good-defeats-evil ending seen in Hammer's more popular stock has here been subverted to something far more bleak and nihilistic in keeping with the zeitgeist (though it should be pointed out that by the time The Damned was finally released, such concerns had to some degree become nugatory.) That The Damned recapitulates concerns of the 1950s and 1960s at all is down to Losey's political astuteness and penchant for social commentary. Cold War paranoia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, clandestine governments experimenting with nuclear power and disaffected youth are all touched on here just as Losey had touched on the increasingly diffuse class system of the 1960s in The Servant (1963) and capital punishment in Time Without Pity (1957). While in his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger (1954), a young thug is experimented on by a psychiatrist who attempts to 'cure' him of his violent ways; a progenitor of sorts to A Clockwork Orange's Alex. Troubled youth is encapsulated in one line in particular as one of the military men barks to young gang member Ted "Your sort don't have any rights," reflecting the stifling patriarchal rule and lack of freedom of the 1950s and early 1960s that would give rise to the angry- young-men of the same period, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Hammer were keen to make a more contemporary film grounded in realism at this time. Violent, youthful rebellion is the first thing the camera shows us where The Damned begins in Losey's typical style of exposition (sound and action with no dialogue) as the teddy boys orchestrate with military precision the mugging and gang-beating of Simon Wells, a middle-aged American tourist, by using a honey-trap in the form of gang leader King's sensual but subjugated sister, Joanie. Recovering in a hotel lobby a battered and bruised Simon prophetically remarks that he did not expect such senseless and asinine violence to be present England; an issue that should resonate today with socially conscious audiences and those with an interest in the 'hoodie-horror' sub-genre.